With Microsoft Azure Container Service, 'Containers As A Service' Trend Picks up Momentum

Microsoft has made the preview of Azure Container Service (ACS) available to a broader set of developers. Originally announced at AzureCon in October 2015, the service went into private tech preview mode in December.

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Containers as a Service (CaaS) is becoming the new Platform as a Service (PaaS). With the interest in containers and microservices skyrocketing among developers, cloud providers are capitalizing on the opportunity through hosted container management services. Through the bring-your-own-container (BYOC) approach, developers can launch container images stored in central repositories such as Docker Hub or Quay.io.

ACS supports two orchestration engines – Docker Swarm and Mesosphere DCOS. Docker Swarm is the native orchestration engine developed and maintained by Docker, Inc. Mesosphere Data Center OS is a sophisticated orchestrated engine that supports a broad range of workloads including containers. Customers can choose the orchestration engine of their choice to manage the clusters. At the heart of the service is the ACS layer that Microsoft has built to interface its assets with the orchestration engines. This layer manages the provisioning of infrastructure resources such as VMs, block storage devices, IP addresses, security groups, scale sets, and load balancers. During the preview mode, the service is available through the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template, which is used to the launch the cluster. When it moves to general availability, Microsoft may integrate the service tightly with the portal and command line interface. Customers will be able to launch the container cluster the same way they launch an HDInsight Hadoop cluster on Linux.

Google was one of the first to offer a hosted container platform in the form of Google Container Engine (GKE). It acts as a thin layer that bridges the gap between Google Compute Engine and the orchestration engine powered by Kubernetes. After launching the cluster, developers and administrators can use the same tools that they use to manage a typical Kubernetes deployment. Amazon has been offering a hosted container management service since 2014. Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) runs on the proven EC2 IaaS layer to deliver hosted container services. Amazon has chosen to build a proprietary cluster management service instead of adopting Docker Swarm or Kubernetes. Rackspace has launched Carina, a CaaS offering, that runs on Docker Swarm. Joyent’s Triton is another hosted container

Docker, Inc. is not far behind in delivering CaaS. It acquired Tutum, a multi-cloud container management startup that complements Docker by giving it the runtime capabilities. It’s also readying Universal Control Plane (UCP) to target enterprises wanting to run CaaS on-premises.

I think that Microsoft has made the right move with the modular architecture of ACS. By creating a generic layer that’s capable of running any orchestrator, Azure can eventually support a wide range of cluster managers. Initially, it is Docker Swarm and Mesosphere, but technically nothing prevents Microsoft from running Kubernetes within ACS. This service when integrated with Azure Stack, delivers a unified and consistent experience for enterprises running containerized workloads. Having revamped the IaaS offerings to match AWS, Microsoft’s next goal is to bring feature parity between Azure public cloud and the private cloud platform based on Azure Stack.

With the official entry of Microsoft into the CaaS market, the competition is certainly heating up.